Toxic People: Bolesław Chromry
feat: Chair, Magdalena Sawicka, DOOM 3K
Bolesław Chromry’s new individual painting exhibition features portraits of toxic people from his life, from his early childhood and school years to the present. The portrayed characters include his old friends, family members, teachers and even personified four-legged figures. All of them are depicted by Chromry through their core, essential features, often with metaphorical and symbolic attributes, which makes them seem familiar, close. Playing a game of associations, the artist starts from very personal traumas and experiences, but he manages to speak about certain universal phenomena that are close to everyone. By revisiting
memories and facing a poisoned past, Chromry performs a cathartic reconstruction of a dream school, in which the roles are reversed and all the mean teachers wear dunce caps.
In this project, Chromry draws attention to fears and all that is unpleasant and uncomfortable – especially in relationships with others. He creates a kind of universal toxin, whose words or actions leave an emotional mark on anyone who experiences it. He does so using the characters of unspecified demonic creatures transforming into more abstract entities, or quotes from the statements of specific figures. For this reason, the words with which he
labels his works are just as important as their visual layer.
The people evoked by Chromry – although anonymous for the viewer – together represent a symbolic collective wound, which we dress up with forgetfulness and ignorance or, on the contrary – tear open, not allowing it to heal.
curator: Natalia Barczyńska